


Kintsugi

by DollyPop



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Het Relationship, F/M, Introspection, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 12:08:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8055739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DollyPop/pseuds/DollyPop
Summary: Definition. (Noun) To repair with gold; The art of repairing metal with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.





	Kintsugi

Loving Marie was the stupidest thing he had ever done in his entire life, and that list included cutting Spirit open. Because loving Marie was more dangerous than even that; it was a whirlwind of emotion he was unaccustomed to and he wished, sometimes, that he could simply up and leave.

He can’t. He couldn’t. Because the problem with loving a woman like Marie was that it was so awfully, breathtakingly, perfectly easy. As simple as breathing, autonomous and swift. He had fallen for her hard enough that it was as though coming headfirst off of a thousand foot building, slamming into the sidewalk with enough force to liquefy organs. And, yet, he could remember never being happier, more at ease, than by her.

Simple as breathing. Just as necessary.

But loving Marie was foolish. It was a vulnerability that needled at him, because if Marie was anything, she was a wound he couldn’t stitch up, a gaping laceration that he couldn’t remove. Caring for others was a luxury and a stupidity he had avoided for the majority of his life.

Now, waking in cold sweats over seeing her face drain of life in his dreams turned nightmares, he wishes he could go back. And, at the same time, he would never return to a different life.

* * *

The problem is that, even before the battle on the moon, and the bloody fights they faced together, and the wounds they wouldn't have recovered from without the other there as support, he never expected her to stay. Marie was gloriously bright, too gleaming for his hands to touch, lest she illuminate all the sins he had yet to pay for. He was living off of borrowed time, he knew. One day, Death would come for his head.

But Death was dead, Stein reminded himself. And he, this shroud of a man, was not. But he might as well be.

He might as well be when he lays down to sleep, lulled by Marie’s warmth as she curls next to him, her bare body pressed to his. And it should be enough for him but his mind was never so kind in the past to spare him the horrors he could conjure up.

Because he closes his eyes and he is back there, again. Back to the battle. Back to rearing back and telling Eruka he was ready though he would never truly be ready, back to throwing Marie to the moon. He returns, over and over, to the moment after it all goes dark, the moon hiding in the sky, fully shrouded in black blood and the bile rises in his throat. Marie. Gods, God, Marie. Marie. Marie and what she meant and what she carried- lost. On the moon. And he couldn’t see her or feel her and his thoughts were fragments, fracturing through her.

Because, when he is asleep, there is never the moment of realization that she and Spirit are safe, back on the Earth, the witches’ final save to prove their mercy.

Here, there, in his head, it is only him, alone, falling to his knees though he didn’t even realize they had buckled, staring up at the sky.

Sometimes, it is worse. Sometimes, he is standing there, with them, looking through someone else’s eyes. Sid’s, maybe. Spirit’s, even. Because it is only ever Marie he focuses on, the way she is tucked against a side, the way she has closed her eye, preparing for the worst. Her hand always, always, comes to her stomach, and she sobs, hard, heavy, and he wants to hold her, tell her ‘I’m here, I’m here’ like he has in the past, press her to his chest and hide away her horror and sadness but-

It is too late and the blood is thick and viscous and he shouldn’t be able to see the way it seeps into her mouth as she opens it to scream, shouldn’t be able to see how she suffocates and-

“Franken! Franken, shhh, it’s okay!” he hears and his eyes have snapped open, chest heaving as he claws at the sheets, realizing a moment too late that he is thrashing, breathing too heavily as he stares up at her face. She’s glowing like a lightning bug, the only illumination left. Because even though their windows are open, there is no moon grinning down. She is the only light and he-

He doesn’t think as he reaches up to grasp her hair, press her to him, kiss her with a ferocity as though she were the only air and he needed to breathe. Her gasp, her hand coming to settle over her chest as it slips away from his shoulder, the way she marveled in the moment for just a heartbeat before she kissed him back, soft lips moving pliant against his, made something in his ribcage throb. She was okay, she was alright. His arm comes about her waist, holding her even as their mouths disconnect, and she presses her forehead against his, whispers sweet, reassuring words, worry knotting her muscles.

He only ever whispers her name. There are no ‘I love you’s in his vocabulary.

* * *

The problem is that nightmares are old friends to him. Before her, it was other things. Rooms of isolation, of being locked from the entire world. Before her, it was battles where he had to hold his guts in as they tried spilling from his open abdomen. Before her, it was the face of a witch trying to tempt him, turned grotesque, rotting, disfigured.

Now, it is only her. Now, he has made the foolish, stupid, novice mistake of letting himself care about someone else and Gods does he care about Marie even if he wants to spare her from his inadequate affections. Now, it is the image of her on an operating table, his hands caked to the elbow. And he cannot tell if he is helping her or harming her and that is the worst of it all.

What kind of man is he? What kind of man does he want to be?

He thinks he shouldn’t be alive. He has stolen time, somewhere. Men like him were meant to be dead by twenty. Eighteen. Not brave but reckless. Not brave but with nothing to lose.

Now, he is still not brave, but because he is cautious. Because he has things tethering him. And he finds that, as much as he hated being leashed before, by the DWMA’s rules, by the ethics of science, by the idiocies of conventional morality, she never makes him feel as though he is obligated to be grounded. Rather, it is a choice.

He chose this. He chose these nightmares. He could have had others.

He knows that is not true. Loving Marie did not happen with his consent. But he only stays because he wants to. Now, it is only her.

Sometimes, he thinks it always was.

* * *

The best scenario is that he wakes from the dreams of his hands in her belly, ripping something out, and she is before him, whole and beautiful and trusting. The best scenario is that his hands can find her hips and she will bend to him because he knows she loves him, trusts him, tells him so when he is in her soul, in her, by her, close. The best scenario is that she is there.

But there are nights when she is away, throwing up into the toilet or the sink at ungodly hours and he is a horrible baby daddy, as Spirit calls him, because he is not beside her, rubbing her back, keeping her hair from her face, supporting her. There are nights when she is off getting a snack, or couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to bother him, so she has settled for watching television in a different room.

And all he can think is that she is gone for good. There are nights when he wakes from nightmares where the real him, the him of rationality, of understanding, of consciousness, has to watch as some twisted caricature of him mutilates her. With a scalpel or otherwise. And he screams himself hoarse but in reality, he cannot open his mouth. And when he finally awakens, because she turns to look at him, tears in her big, beautiful golden eye, and mouths ‘How could you?’ or ‘I love you’ or ‘I loved you’ or ‘I trusted you’, he is grasping the bedsheets and there are tears streaming down his face that he convinces himself is sweat and she isn’t there. She isn’t there and he thinks his nightmares are memories.

And he deserves this deserves this deserves this. It was his damn fault. What business did a man like him have in loving someone? Loving Marie?

When she finally makes her way back to the room, he can feel her worry. And he feigns sleep. And he wants to get just the slightest bit away from her, push her from him. She settles back in bed, always, tries not to wake him when she comes in as close as possible.

And all he does is wait until she is sleeping before he brings his arms around her.

* * *

Sometimes, he wonders just how much she can take of having to be his comfort. He is a mess, made of pieces, trying to come back together for her, because of her, because she makes him want to be a better man, worthy of her affection.

He is a mess and he is selfish. But when he thinks of those things, it is when he has forgotten the nights when she wakes, silently gasping, blinking back something from her eyes.

It is the most selfish part of him that he likes that she has nightmares, too. That they are, in a way, mirrors of each other, compartmentalizing in different ways. It is the ugliest, harshest part of him that revels in her grief, in her agony, that she understands in ways no one else has ever shown him that they do.

And it is the best in him, the parts that love her, that want to take that and twist it into his own chest, to keep her pain from her, to take it as his own. Because, sometimes, he is not the shroud. Sometimes, he is useful and he likes to be, because Marie wakes with a breath as though she was underwater and he immediately knows something is wrong even if he is deep asleep.

There are nights they spend with her head tucked down, hand over her missing eye, remembering how she lost it, looking for comfort against him that he is so ready to give. There are nights he spends awkwardly holding her, not quite knowing how, stroking her hair, her back, seating her in his lap. There are nights they spend where she is under him, crying and telling him not to stop, don’t ever stop, that, ‘please’, she needs this, needs him right then.

And he feels useful. And he hates that he wants to feel useful. And he hates that he wonders if that’s why she sticks around through his nightmares, too.

Needing to be needed. Wanting to be wanted.

* * *

The truth is that he is not used to loving anything. Not himself, not his work, not anything or anyone. And, sometimes, he resents her for unearthing a piece of him he had previously believed to be nonexistent.

And, other times, he realizes it is the best in him. That she is the best of him.

That loving her is what makes him painfully, wonderfully human.

* * *

One night, they are lying in bed and the room is dark as it always is, and their legs are bent at the knee, her own pressed to his. They’re tangled in the way they always are: unable to tell where one starts and the other begins, and they’re staring up at the ceiling, breathing hard, hands still curled around each other, trying to cool.

“Hey,” she speaks, still breathless, “Do you remember when we thought we were just friends?” she asked, and he grunted in acknowledgement, answered by her soft giggle, playfully running his soul over her own. “Back then…I used to dream about this.”

“Mmm?” he responds, not yet ready to speak. His thumb is soothing over her knuckles, his chest rising and falling, steadily; content just to listen to her as she spoke, in a confessing mood as she always was after they’ve been together.

“Yeah…and I used to get so mad because I knew it would never happen.”

He bumped his knee against her own, their thighs pressed together at the side, a smooth, clean seam, even if she was so much smaller than he was. He wanted to kiss her again, he realized, so he rolled to his side, lifting himself up on an elbow, and as though she understood him, because she did, she’d done the same. They were mirrors of each other, fractal images staring back, and her lips had curled up, something he could feel when he kissed her. And it was smooth and slow and easy, as easy as loving her, as easy as falling for her, as easy as falling.

Between breaths, she kept talking: “I thought-“ “I was so-“ “stupid for liking-“ “you. You’d never-“ “love me back.”

He ran his hand up from the base of her spine up to the back of her neck to hold her in place as he kissed her silly, and she shuddered pleasantly against him when he did so. She so did love when he’d grab her there. When they finally pulled away, she couldn’t speak for a moment, a point of pride for him as he scooted down, resting his head on her chest as she stroked his hair.

When did finally opened her mouth, it was with old, familiar words. “I love you, you know?”

“I know,” he replied back, and she giggled. “You know?” he asked her, parroting.

“I know,” she echoed, tugging on his hair playfully, kissing the top of his head, much to his delight.

It was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, reciprocating. He’d grown soft in the light of her adoration. Had grown so acutely aware of the pain of losing her. Had made himself vulnerable in ways he never thought he would.

And, yet, laying there with her, he couldn’t help but feel that loving Marie was the greatest thing he could have ever done.


End file.
